Lots of pride, a little prejudice

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Liz Philosophos Cooper as Georgiana, a Jane Austen novel character, during the Jane Austen Society's annual convention in New York.

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JOSHUA BRIGHT/New York Times

Traditional English country dancing during the Jane Austen Society's annual convention in New York.

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JOSHUA BRIGHT/New York Times

The Jane Austen gathering included hours of country dancing.

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JOSHUA BRIGHT/New York Times

Jason Bohon, from New York, illustrates a culture clash in the washroom..

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JOSHUA BRIGHT/New York Times

A modern convenience takes attendees from the convention into the streets.

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JOSHUA BRIGHT/New York Times

Regency dresses, demure bonnets and straw baskets were the official costumes of the Jane Austen Society's annual convention that lasted three days and was attended by more than 700 of the author's fans.

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NEW YORK About 100 people gathered at the Gramercy Park Hotel in 1979 for the inaugural gathering of the Jane Austen Society of North America, dressed in a style The New Yorker summed up as “dinner dresses, subdued-looking jewellery, comfortable-looking jackets.”

When the society took its annual meeting to the Marriott in downtown Brooklyn last weekend for a kind of homecoming, things were rather different. Attendance was more than 700, the event lasted three days, and the daytime dress code for many ran to pale Regency dresses, demure bonnets and straw baskets to hold anything that wouldn’t fit into a period-correct reticule.

“This is a place where people can let their Jane Austen freak flag fly,” said Julia Matson of Minneapolis, the creator of an Austen-themed tea line (Mr. Darcy: “a bold beginning, yet a smooth finish”), who was at her third meeting.

It was also a place to go back to the texts, and this year JASNA, as the society is known, lined up some unusually heavy hitters to deliver the plenary lectures on the meeting’s theme of power, money and sex.

Cornel West, a self-described Jane Austen fanatic, brought down the house with a thunderous Saturday morning sermon on Austen’s understanding of human suffering that name-checked Sophocles, Shakespeare, Chekhov and Leo Strauss. Sandy Lerner, a co-founder of Cisco Systems and the founder of Chawton House Library (near the Hampshire cottage where Austen wrote some of her novels), lectured on Austen’s faulty understanding of cash.

But novelist Anna Quindlen set the tone for the weekend with a rousing keynote address lamenting two centuries of male condescension to Austen’s seemingly small domestic dramas.

“It burns me that there were only men at the funeral,” Quindlen said, noting that Austen’s gravestone at Winchester Cathedral made no mention of her books.

She also recalled another man who wanted to bury Austen, a professor at Barnard in the 1960s who dismissed Austen as “a second-tier novelist” — something he wouldn’t say now, Quindlen said, even if he were probably still thinking it.

It was an insult that the overwhelmingly female audience, some of whom hissed at Quindlen’s mentions of Jonathan Franzen and “the dismissive label chick-lit,” seemed to take personally.

Austen, in fact, had many early male champions, and the term “Janeite” — coined by the critic George Saintsbury in 1894 — was embraced by male fans such as Rudyard Kipling, who wore it with pride. But in the 20th century it came to be applied to the “wrong” kind of reader: overly effusive, academically untrained and often female.

In her new book, Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures, the Princeton University scholar Claudia L. Johnson traces the gap between academics and everyday Austen fans to D.W. Harding’s seminal 1940 essay, Regulated Hatred, which suggested that Austen herself would have despised the besotted readers who failed to recognize that her novels were about the “eruption of fear and hatred into the relationships of everyday social life.”

There was certainly no hatred in Brooklyn, where the emphasis was squarely on sisterly celebration of the woman whom Henry James backhandedly called “everybody’s dear, Jane.”

At a well-attended workshop called Dressing the Miss Bennets, Lisa Brown, a proofreader and Royal Navy expert from Rochester, walked attendees through the basics of Regency attire.

“It’s all about the lift,” she said, pointing to a modern push-up bra on an inflatable dummy named Lydia, after the airhead of the Bennet family. “The most important thing to achieving this look is your undergarment.” Brown added that a proper Regency lady would have worn crotchless panties, if she wore them at all. (Pulling them down to use the toilet was too complicated.)

In 1991 the scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick drew headlines for her paper Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl, which was widely derided as epitomizing the excesses of postmodern theory. If such provocative presentations were hardly on the schedule last weekend, audiences were not entirely unreceptive to readings that probed underneath the seemingly decorous surfaces of Austen’s novels.

Mary Ann O’Farrell, a professor of English at Texas A&M University, giving her first lecture to the society (on manners in Austen), said she was surprised that a reference to her recent paper Bin Laden a Huge Jane Austen Fan: Jane Austen in Contemporary Political Discourse drew a big laugh.

“People here are much more sophisticated readers of Austen than the world gives them credit for,” she said. “They are willing to think critically, in both senses of the word.”

Some scholars at the meeting said senior colleagues had discouraged them from getting too involved with the group, lest they get caught up in “effusions of fancy,” as one put it — or worse, photographed in costume. And certainly the event can produce some culture shock.

“When I first came, as a graduate student, I was kind of freaked out by the level of ardour,” said Juliette Wells, an associate professor at Goucher College and the author of Everybody’s Jane, a study of Austen and pop culture. “I wasn’t sure if I would come back.”

But the society, Wells said, “has been very good to me,” a point echoed by other scholars who cited its research grants and peer-reviewed journal, Persuasions. Even more important, they say, is the chance to speak to an audience that has done all the reading — sometimes 20 or 30 times.

Attendees’ knowledge often goes far beyond Austen’s six novels. During a talk on mercenary motives in Austen’s fiction (which included a handout listing all the known financial information given about 40 characters), Marilyn Francus, an associate professor at West Virginia University, wondered aloud how everyone would know at the beginning of Pride and Prejudice that Mr. Darcy had 10,000 pounds a year.

One audience member shouted out that detailed information about inheritances was published in newspapers, as part of the probate process. Another noted that gentlemen sometimes had to list their income publicly, as proof of credit.

“I learn so much from these people,” Francus said. “I would never dare condescend to a JASNA audience.”

In her bin Laden paper (which appears in the new scholarly collection Uses of Austen), O’Farrell of Texas A&M examines the way “ugly couplings” like the best-selling mash-up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies draw easy laughs at the expense of the typical Austen devotee, who is presumed to be a dotty bluestocking seeking escape from modern life.

The modern world certainly seemed far away at the Regency Ball, which began with a hearty toast to “our goddess, the divine Jane Austen” and included several hours of English country dances, like the Seven Shillings and Money in Both Pockets, with music provided by a four-piece band called Persuasion.

The elaborately dressed crowd included several admirals, a blue-gowned woman clutching a stuffed pug (in homage to Lady Bertram of Mansfield Park) and a spectacularly bewigged Georgiana, the real-life duchess of Devonshire.

There wasn’t a zombie in sight. There were also precious few male partners, despite the efforts of intrepid cross-dressers like Baronda Bradley, a supply-chain logistics consultant from Fort Worth, Texas, and well-known Austen society fashion plate, who was wearing a tweed jacket and paisley waistcoat over a 1940s corset turned backward, to achieve a sufficiently stiff male carriage.

“Every year people wait to see what I’m wearing,” said Bradley, who had brought eight different outfits for the meeting, including the bonnet and day dress she wore on the plane.